1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of and an apparatus for automatically playing arpeggio using an electronic musical instrument.
2. Prior Art
In general, arpeggio playings are executed manually not only on conventional musical instruments but also on electronic musical instruments. Arpeggio playing is a highly skilled playing technique wherein one note or a plurality of notes extending over plural octaves is repeatedly played. Accordingly, only skillful persons can play arpeggio by now, and the musical compositions which require the player to play arpeggio have been known as those which are extremely difficult to be played.
There have been proposed in the prior art, various electronic musical instruments in which musical tones are produced by means of an electronic circuit technique. In the widely used electronic musical instrument of a keyboard scanning type, the data on notes and octaves of tones to be sounded are obtained by repetitively and sequentially scanning key switches and one specific tone or a plurality of specific tones to be sounded are selected in accordance with the instructions of the obtained key data. In order to play on these types of electronic musical instruments, the player may operate them similarly as on the commonly known conventional or natural musical instruments. He can perform arpeggio playing on them by operating keys corresponding to one specific note or a plurality of specific notes over plural octaves. There have already been proposed some systems for realizing automatic performances in electronic musical instruments. The general principle conventionally employed for practicing automatic performances of these instruments is to take out information of a practical performance by a certain player in the form of electrical signals and to store the information in a memory medium, either analogly or digitally, and to read-out a partitioned or whole portion of the stored performance information as required for reproduction in a form of acoustic information. Particular playing performance by a certain player may indeed be repeatedly reproduced by such a manner, but it is not possible to allow the player to express his own musical idea freely nor possible to allow him to play music which is rich in originality by such a method. Particularly in order for the player to perform artistic playing by freely resorting to highly skillful playing techniques such as arpeggio, the aforementioned conventional principle is not satisfactory. There has, therefore, been a demand for the advent of a novel automatic playing system.